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Report

Beyond the Prescription: Community Pharmacy's Role in Comprehensive GLP-1 Care

Professional headshot of Athena Roesler, a woman with medium-length curly brown hair and glasses, wearing a light blue blouse with buttons. She is smiling and posed against a dark gray background.

Athena Rae Roesler

Director, Public Health, Milken Institute Health
Athena Rae Roesler is a director on the Public Health team at Milken Institute Health, where she leads a portfolio of work focused on prevention and chronic disease.
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Anita Totten

Senior Associate, Public Health, Milken Institute Health
Anita Totten, a senior associate on the Public Health team at the Milken Institute, provides project and research support for the team’s chronic disease and prevention, mental health, and health equity strategic pillars of work. She actively champions the role of employers in whole-person health through projects that advance racial equity and mental health system changes, employer-sponsored insurance innovation, obesity care modernization, and investments in digital health for substance use disorders.
Professional headshot of Madelyn McLaughlin, a woman with long red hair styled in loose waves, wearing a black blouse and a delicate necklace. She is smiling and posed against a dark gray background.

Madelyn McLaughlin

Senior Associate, Public Health, Milken Institute Health
Madelyn McLaughlin is a senior associate on the public health team at the Milken Institute. She has contributed to over a dozen reports and articles focused on mental health and the role of employers as key public health partners.
Professional headshot of Sarah Wells Kocsis, a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and glasses, wearing a turquoise dress. She is smiling with arms crossed and posed against a dark gray background.

Sarah Wells Kocsis

Senior Director, Public Health, Milken Institute Health
Sarah Wells Kocsis is a senior director at the Milken Institute. She oversees the Public Health programmatic pillar which focuses on mental health, prevention, chronic disease, infrastructure, and health equity, and also is responsible for day-to-day operations.
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Community-Based Health Care
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As demand for glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) therapies grows and indications expand across chronic disease, people face a fragmented landscape: coverage restrictions, affordability challenges, side effects, lifestyle changes, and adherence barriers. Recent developments, including the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge demonstration, show how quickly access is shifting for some populations, yet raise questions about how to ensure people are comprehensively supported. Because obesity and related cardiometabolic conditions are multifactorial and chronic in nature, GLP-1 care requires sustained management rather than a single point of intervention. Community pharmacies can play a pivotal role in helping people use these treatments safely and successfully over time. Initiating therapy is the first step in a process that typically requires dose titration, side- effect management, adherence support, lifestyle changes, and coordination among prescribers and health plans.

To examine this opportunity, Milken Institute Public Health analyzed how community pharmacies can support people throughout their GLP-1 journey. The research draws on thought-leader interviews with pharmacies, advocacy organizations, payers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, along with complementary public opinion research, to better understand key gaps and opportunities in the comprehensive cardiometabolic care pathway, pharmacists’ role in supporting this pathway, and patient perceptions of pharmacists as care partners.

Four themes emerged from this research:

1) pharmacy as the ongoing, low-barrier touchpoint in GLP-1 care;
2) integration with wraparound care and personalized support;
3) navigating access friction, from “Bridge” to what comes next; and
4) the systems and infrastructure constraints that limit consistent delivery.

Together, these highlight opportunities to strengthen how pharmacies can support the full GLP-1 care continuum. The report recommends actions that pharmacies, payers and health plans, patients and consumers, government and policymakers, and prescribing providers can take to establish a more consistent role for pharmacy in wraparound GLP-1 care.

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